Co-Design and Policy Playgrounds: Solving a Deficit in Process or Politics?

• In Event: Scaling Up Co-creation? The Politics of Participatory Innovation Instruments

Abstract

Across Europe (and elsewhere) policy and practice relating to the democratisation of science and innovation has recently moved focus to approaches such as co-design and co-creation. Such approaches aim to use design-based methods such as prototyping to build citizen participation into the policy design process. However, questions remain as to whether this approach has the potential to overcome barriers to public participation relating to structures, legitimacy, representativeness and power already identified in the literature.

In this paper we consider these issues. Specifically, we look at the experience of the ‘policy playgrounds’ organised as part of the EU funded ‘SISCODE’ project, which bring together policymakers to discuss and trial approaches to co-design, to consider how co-design is understood by policymakers, what that tells us about modes and structures of knowledge production and the potential of these approaches to contribute to changes in power, responsibility and possible discussions of the political issues within innovation. As well as reflecting upon the work being done by terminology such as ‘playgrounds’, ‘sandpits’ and ‘fablabs’, we argue that the concept of co-design risks reflecting a new form of ‘solutionism’, in which a perceived deficit in process is solved by design approaches, while questions about power, responsibility and the entanglement of values, politics and technology are neglected.

Authors

• Trupti Patel, UCL

• Melanie Smallman, University College London